It appears that fatherhood and the crisis of fatherlessness is back in the news (though sad that it required Nicholas Cruz to reawaken us). But when we last went through this, in the 1990s, our leaders addressed it very dishonestly, with expensive but pointless social programs rather than confronting the government machinery that was causing the problem. This article, recently published in the Daily Caller, shows what we did wrong the first time and how to avoid making the same mistakes.

Interview with Geopolitika

This is an English translation of a recent interview with the Belgrade newspaper Geopolitika, largely on the topic of parental rights (Serbian version here).

STEPHEN BASKERVILLE, PROFESSOR AT PATRICK HENRY COLLEGE IN VIRGINIA, DESCRIBED BY CRAIG ROBERTS AS THE GREATEST SCHOLAR FOR CUSTODY, FAMILY JUSTICE SYSTEM AND DIVORCE, IN AN INTERVIEW FOR THE GEOPOLITIKA

AGENDA OF SEXUAL RADICALS AND CIVIL SERVANTS

Interviewer: Milan Starčević

The case of the Trkulja family and the one of Mila Alečković, whose children were illegally taken away from them by the Centre for Social Work, has shaken the conscience of honest and moral people in Serbia. In the meanwhile, there have been new cases of children abduction, which leads to a conclusion that the matrix of evil was established on the model of Scandinavian countries, especially Norway, where services for child protection Barneverent have been active since 1992. These services are public agencies responsible (as they state) for child protection in Norway. It has services in every municipality, which are assisted and supervised by various state bodies. According to the data of the state, by the end of 2015, 36800 children had received help from Norwegian services for child protection. Based on the statement of the Romanian lawyer Peter Costea, who represented Romanian families whose children were abducted, annually in Norway about 10000 children are taken away from their parents. In November 2015 Barneverent illegally and without court order took five underage children from the Bodnariu family. The main reason for this was religion. Pavel Astakhov, former Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner, claimed that services in Norway kidnap children from Russia in order to solve their population problems. The Indian Government protested in 2012 with the strong diplomatic note sent to the Norwegian official authorities because they took two children from the Indian couple who were working there. Polish private detective Krzysztof Rutkowski has helped in two cases to return Polish children from Norwegian foster families to their biological families. In one case, the girl was manipulated by Barneverent to claim that her parents had abused her. Later, the request from the Norwegian authorities to return the girl was rejected as unfounded by the Polish court. There are many similar examples of children abduction in Norway, and there are more and more cases in other countries. That was the reason for the interview with Stephen Baskerville, American professor of political sciences at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville (Virginia). Paul Craig Roberts described him as the greatest scholar for custody, family justice system and divorce. Baskerville distinguished himself with his author’s work on comparative and international politics, political ideologies, with an emphasis on family politics and sexuality. He is the author of some very important and widely read books, including The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage and the Family, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution, The New Politics of Sex, and Taken into Custody. The Serbian public found out about Baskerville because of the book Gender equality and human rights problem, which was translated into Serbian by Slobodan Stojicevic, and published by Catena Mundi. In December last year, Stephen Baskerville visited Serbia after the invitation from the Institute for European Studies, the Center for Family and Catena Mundi. On that occasion, he gave several lectures in Belgrade and Novi Sad.

In the past few months Serbia has been under the influence of Norwegian Barnevernet syndrome (child protection), where centers for social work take away children from biological parents, without any court ruling, while the scenes of taking away children from their homes resemble horror films. What was the purpose of establishing this service? Are there some other interest groups from the world involved, besides the Norwegian government, which finances its work?

-This problem has arisen from a combination of ideology and bureaucratic power. The professionalization of social work, which accompanied the rise of the welfare state, created perverse incentives for social workers to find child abuse wherever they could, or to fabricate it if necessary. Social work also became one of the most politicized professions, with social workers trained in feminist ideology that is highly hostile to heterosexual parents in general and fathers in particular.

It is worth noting that, to the extent that child abuse is really a serious problem, it too is largely the creation of the welfare agencies. We know without doubt that most true child abuse takes place in the homes of single mothers, not in the intact families that are often the targets of the child abuse agencies. Because the removal of the father is often engineered with the connivance of the social worker agencies, it is no exaggeration to say that these agencies are intentionally creating the problem that they claim to be solving.

I cannot speak to the specific case of the Barnevernet, or say precisely how it compares to others, but there are many such agencies that routinely abuse their authority.

Do you know if there are any similar organizations in other countries in the world? What is the situation in your homeland America?

-There are similar such agencies in many if not all the western countries. Those in the Nordic countries are probably the most extreme. But agencies in the United Kingdom have also received notoriety, though it is difficult to know if that is because they are among the most abusive or if the media there is more willing to report on it. We have serious problems here in the United States. Occasionally a major scandal will surface, but there is never any in-depth official investigation about why it happened, and most of the time the media ignores it. There are been several good books and studies exposing the systematic problem, but they never result in any change.

Any corrective measure for punishing children, even the smallest one, is forbidden in almost all countries. Barnevernet in Norway officially has an order to intervene on the slightest suspicion of physical or psychological abuse of a child. Is the law that was passed to supposedly protect children from abuse, only an introduction to abduction of children by the state?

-In a word, yes. Part of the problem is that there is no real definition of child abuse and no abstract definition is really possible, and child abuse is not adjudicated as a crime soc social workers have enormous discretion. Social workers are permitted to decide on their own if parents have abused their children and then remove them on their own judgement. Perfunctory safeguards may exist, such as the requirement that the action be approved by a judge, but this is not an effective protection, since judges also have a conflict-of-interest. The only way to truly protect the rights of parents is for child abuse to be prosecuted as a crime, like violent assault, with both the full force of the law and the protections for the parents under due process of law. Then parents are either left in peace if they are innocent or jailed if they are guilty. But now it is treated as a gray area: You are not charged with a crime and generally not in danger of prison, but you also have no protection against losing your children without any effective or open judicial proceeding.

Strategy of the New World Order to destroy families is entering the second phase. After achieving high divorce rate on the global level, the ideologists of destruction have moved on to a more terrible crime, and that is taking children from their parents. Where are the roots of the evil systematic destruction of the family as the nucleus of society?

-You are correct that these two practices are closely connected. Fabricated accusations of child abuse began as standard procedure in divorce cases, usually against fathers. But they can also be used against mothers or both parents in intact families. We even have cases (as I show in my previous book, Taken Into Custody) where mothers who are not seeking divorce are ordered to divorce their husbands and threatened with losing their children if they refuse, even when there is no suggestion of abuse. The social workers hate fathers, and they hate heterosexual mothers almost as much.

What is in this dishonorable undertaking the role of the UN, NGOs and various organizations, which are putting pressure on governments to raise children in the spirit of Big Brother: to accept homosexual marriages, sexual education at school, gender equality and other distorted values?

-You are correct that all these matters are interconnected, though it would take me some time to explain how. (It is all explained in some detail in my most recent book, The New Politics of Sex.) They all occupy a huge amount of the time and attention of functionaries at the United Nations. In fact, it is astounding how obsessed the UN has now become with sex, though most of their activity is below the media radar screen and receives very little scrutiny from outside. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (to which Serbia is a signatory, but the United States is not) reinforces the power of social workers and other government officials to confiscate children and otherwise curtail the authority and violate the rights of parents. The larger point here is that all these campaigns really emanate from one agenda, and they are all being pushed by the same sexual radicals and civil servants.

Have you investigated what happens to children who had been taken away from their parents? There are various testimonies that those children are sold to rich people, homosexual couples, and even that they are used as organ donors. Does this case of abduction of children bring money to the entire money industry including lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, judges, various agencies?

-I have speculated on this matter myself, because when you understand the logic of the system, and how children are already being used as pawns in others’ games of power, such scenarios are not implausible. All the groups you mention are certainly already using children in the most cynical manner for their own political purposes, such as rationalizing the government funding they receive. I myself have described the divorce-custody machinery as a child kidnapping and extortion racket, and I am not the first. So far however, I have not seen any investigations or documentation of such matters. But clearly this is something that should be explored by journalists and scholars. Obviously they would encounter hostility and probably punishment from their own professions.

Why is the case of family violence, which is the most common reason (pretense) to take away children from parents, given to homosexual clerks or feminists? Who gives them the authority to do the dirty job? Governments or the so-called “deep state”?

-Feminists naturally gravitate toward professions like social work, psychotherapy, family law, childcare, child support enforcement, and welfare because it gives them control over other people’s children and private lives. The entire welfare state is a feminist matriarchy that is now growing out of control and bankrupting every society on earth, with very few serious attempts to bring it under control. Any attempt to control their power or spending is depicted as an attack on the “the poor” or “abused children,” when in reality it is these government agencies that are responsible for the poverty and the abuse in the first place. More recently, homosexualist activists seems to follow a similar career path.

Parents, whose child has been taken away, get a court expert imposed by the state apparatus, in order to establish a diagnosis of imprudence, certain psycho-syndromic problems, all in order to be declared unfit to be parents. Is it logical to conclude that most of the state system is involved in abduction of children?

-Yes, to be blunt, it is no exaggeration. And as you indicate, the entire matter is treated as a matter of therapy rather than justice. Even when there are no allegations of abuse or violence, judges and social workers, in collusion with state-funded psychotherapists of various kinds, claim to assess who and what is a fit parent and what is in “the best interest” of other people’s children,” invoking an assortment of meaningless psycho-babble that no one understands and that can be manipulated to rationalize anything. It is often impossible for parents to defend themselves, their children, and their parental rights against a barrage of psychological jargon that purports to justify seizing their children, even when the parents are not even accused of any legal wrongdoing, let alone proven of having committed it.

The solution is to remove not only child abuse accusations but all child custody determinations entirely from the control of the therapeutic industry and treat it as a matter of justice, with strong and categorical safeguards for the rights of parents who have committed no legal transgression and protections for those accused of one.

Are you optimistic when it comes to the survival of traditional family? How can people, who care about the preservation of their hearth and moral values, fight against all the evil of the new age? How can we preserve our future generations (children) from those who want to turn life on earth into hell?

-I must admit that often I am not optimistic. I despair especially because groups that claim to defend the family (especially in the West) often ignore or misunderstand these issues that you are raising here. Sometimes they even take the side of the social workers and judges against parents. It is sad to report that some family groups that oppose the feminists on issues like abortion, sex education, and euthanasia actually take the side of their enemies and help the feminists when it comes to parental rights and false accusations of child abuse.

People must mobilize and demand that churches, journalists, and scholars stand up and investigate these matters and speak out against the abuses. We cannot rely on lawyers to do this for us. There are good and conscientious lawyers working on these matters, and I met some when I was in Serbia. Peter Costea is a lawyer who led the campaign to bring justice to the Romanian Bodnariu family in Norway, but he did so by mobilizing the general citizenry and by raising the larger political issues. Lawyers can only work within the narrow confines of the legal system, and they themselves are subject to punishments if they offend powerful people. The rest of us – scholars, journalists, priests, ordinary citizens – must be the leaders and go beyond narrow legal questions to publicize the larger politics that surrounds all this. I believe that the greatest single challenge now is to convince the different people who are concerned about different issues – same sex marriage, parental rights, sex education, fathers’ rights, abortion – to work together, rather than at cross-purposes, against their common opponents: the sexual radicals and their allies in the courts and bureaucracies.